My specialty is creating and assessing curricula that use active learning approaches to engage students in the complexity of real-life examples. The goal is to get to a deeper, more fundamental understanding of concepts. Such an approach can help create a framework that allows for transfer of knowledge to other examples, outside of the particular classroom and into the real life of any person (be it personal or professional).

The major areas of research and scholarship are to:

Explore understandings and misunderstandings in science and critical thinking

Missing links and misconceptions in chemistry, genetics, evolution, and probability (and at the intersection of these fields)

Conceptions on the use of evidence and epistemological worldviews

The role of previous teaching on current strengths and problems in understanding

Focus on creating instruments that assess ability to transfer knowledge to real contexts, rather than textbook answers

Assess missing links in teaching and learning that require re-assessment of prior understandings or integration between fields, and thus influence subsequent transfer of knowledge to the real world

Conduct studies to test effectiveness of tools developed in (2) and using assessment strategies from (3)

Undergraduate students are welcome to join in one of several research projects. The projects draw on the fields of cognitive and educational psychology, the philosophy of science, and philosophy of knowledge (epistemology). Students in biology/science, math, education, psychology, philosophy, and other fields will be able to find something suitable to their interests.

Currently, the major project is on student understanding of confounding factors and controlled experiments. With data already available for analysis, undergraduate researchers can join in immediately to answer a variety of questions.